It’s official: Democrats are in the party that stands for legal child sex changes. At least, that’s the unmistakable takeaway from the Democratic response to the massive Supreme Court decision upholding red states’ ability to restrict or ban medical gender transition treatments for minors.
One by one, major Democratic lawmakers came out with statements condemning the decision, most of which peddled the same emotionally manipulative argument, which just so happens to be false.
“Trans kids suffer when they don’t get medically-necessary care,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wrote. “This is a brazen political decision by the Supreme Court.”
“This heartless decision puts trans children in danger,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) added.
“This ruling is devastating and will exacerbate harm for children who depend on this essential and often life-saving, healthcare,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) said.
The Democratic narrative is clear: Allowing states to prohibit child sex changes is heartless and deadly because youth who identify as transgender will kill themselves without access to these treatments. There’s just one problem with this claim: While it has been repeated ad nauseam by transgender activists and activist doctors — “would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?” — there’s no factual truth to the claim.
As the science reporter Benjamin Ryan explained on X, “Only one study has ever directly assessed whether prescribing cross-sex hormones to youths with gender dysphoria is associated with a statistically significant, independent difference in the suicide death rate among them. The study found no such association. Therefore claims such as these that denying such treatment to minors will lead to suicide are not evidence based.”
The U.K.’s extraordinarily comprehensive “Cass Review” by Dr. Hillary Cass reviewing the evidence and research into this subject concluded, “It has been suggested that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide in this population but the evidence found did not support this conclusion.”
In fact, it’s so objectively untrue that even the lead ACLU attorney arguing this case before the Supreme Court, a transgender activist named Chase Strangio, admitted that medical gender transition treatments do not reduce the number of suicides among transgender youth during the oral arguments.
Remember, ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, a radical trans activist, admitted that there is no evidence showing gender-affirming care reduces the number of (already very rare, thank god) completed suicides among transgender youth.
Nonetheless, almost every single Democrat is… pic.twitter.com/OcHysebkyW
— Brad Polumbo
(@brad_polumbo) June 19, 2025
When conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito cited the Cass Review and noted, “there is no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce suicide,” Strangio replied:
“What I think that is referring to is there is no evidence in some — in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide. And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”
This is a remarkable admission that directly undercuts the powerful emotional narrative Democrats and activists have run with, that these drastic treatments literally prevent suicide. When under oath and confronted by the evidence, even Strangio, an extreme transgender activist, admitted that they do not.
Now, Strangio went on to claim that some studies purport to show a reduction in “suicidality,” or suicidal thoughts, but that is not the same thing as reducing suicide. As the Manhattan Institute’s Leo Sapir explains, “Though suicide would be preceded by suicidality, research does not show that suicidality is a reliable predictor of suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2022, for every one person who committed suicide, 270 people ‘seriously thought about suicide’ and 33 attempted it.”
Of course, as Sapir further notes, suicidality is still a distressing outcome worthy of tremendous concern, but it is not synonymous with “suicide” the way activists suggest. It’s also, once again, not even true that high-quality evidence shows that child gender transition reduces suicidality, as the Cass Review further concluded.
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As the journalist Jesse Singal extensively documented, the most frequently cited study supporting this claim has been completely debunked. In fact, that study’s underlying data actually show no improvement in the mental health of gender-distressed youth prescribed hormones or puberty blockers.
Still, Democrats are entirely free to argue that child sex changes should be legal. But most Americans disagree with this radical position. And suggesting that we are to blame for teenagers’ suicides is a nasty, emotionally manipulative, and baseless lie.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.